I especially loved this piece by Les Lofquist on how to respond to a criticism of preaching:
I think the only way is to be determined to be prayed up and studied up the next time you’re in the pulpit. Resolve to get up early each day the next week and pray as a man of God should. Then study seriously. Grapple with next Sunday’s text. Turn off the television. Stop surfing the web. Put away your fantasy team rosters. Dig into the Bible. Pull off from your shelves those theology books and commentaries of yours and pore over them. Review your old Bible College / seminary class lecture notes. Accept the challenge of that passage you’ll be preaching and wrestle with its meaning and outline and application.
Approach next Sunday with all the earnestness you can. After all, it’s God’s holy and written Word you are handling! Get serious about it...

Within the church of the living God, we must become excited about the gospel. That’s how we pass on our heritage
– D.A. Carson
If you want to impress the woman you love and happening to be traveling through the northwest suburbs of Chicago, my advice to you is to spend a significant amount of time in the quaint village of Long Grove and its famous Confectionary. This niche candy shop is a must-stop for those who live and visit the Midwest. I know because my wife considers chocolate as important as oxygen and I consider my wife as important to me as breathing. Those two factors have kept me visiting and browsing the Confectionary’s many aisles of cocoa creations.
Interestingly, it wasn’t my wife’s longings that first acquainted me with this tiny slice of chocolate heaven. When I was around six years old, my father, a licensed plumber, was contracted to...

If you've been a Christian for any length of time, undoubtedly you've been exposed to one or more "proven" methods of sharing your faith. In my lifetime I've been exposed to a few of these. They have been helpful in narrowing down the message, helping me get more comfortable sharing the gospel, and summarizing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
But there is a danger in relying too heavily evangelistic methods or tools. Here are three that concern me:
1) We send the message to ourselves and our hearers that the gospel is simplistic. The truth is that the gospel is simple--simple enough for a child to grasp, Jesus said (Matthew 10:14-15). Paul articulated a one-sentence gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4. And yet, the gospel, while being simple is not simplistic. There are many mind-boggling aspects about which we will never understand. We will never fully grasp the Incarnation, how Jesus could...

Martin Luther, in his commentary on 1 Peter 2, writes this about the implication Peter's declaration that all believers are priests:
A priest must be God’s messenger and must have a command from God to proclaim His Word. You must, says Peter, exercise the chief function of a priest, that is, to proclaim the wonderful deed God has performed for you to bring you out of darkness into the light. And your preaching should be done in such a way that one brother proclaims the mighty deed of God to the other, how you have been delivered through Him from sin, hell, death, and all misfortune, and have been called to eternal life. Thus you should also teach other people how they, too, come into such light. For you must bend every effort to realize what God has done for you. Then let it be your chief work to proclaim this...